I was reading an old edition of H. G. Wells’ “The Outline of History” today. The book is over a century old but in surprisingly good shape. Well, anyway, Wells speculates that the pattern of nomadic herdsmen invading and conquering settled farming communities goes all the way back to Mesopotamia and the Semitic tribes raiding the Sumerian cities.
From what I remember the Sumerians are believed to be the first farmers. And that goes back at least six thousand years ago. That brings us all the way back to the neolithic. So, for our whole history as “civilized” creatures we have been battling against the steppe barbarians just to keep the food that we grew ourselves.
And that brings to mind the movie “Seven Samurai” where the farmers pay samurai to fight off the bandits instead of handing over their harvest. The problem is that bandits and samurai are almost indistinguishable depending on the circumstances. If you think about it whether you give your tithe to the church and your “rent” to Charlemagne or have it stolen by the Vikings must have been a relative distinction. Now, of course, the king didn’t burn your house, rape your wife and take you all as slaves (speaking by and large) but he did make it awfully difficult to get through a long cold winter.
So maybe we’ve come a long way here in the good old U S of A. But consider. Suppose you have a small retail store in Brooklyn NY and for the last five years every day several street criminals shoplift several hundred dollars’ worth of your stock from your shelves. And the police have even stopped arresting these crooks because the George Soros backed District Attorney won’t prosecute them and won’t keep them behind bars for even a day. In what sense are you any better off than a Sumerian farmer or a French peasant in Charlemagne’s day? On paper you have the backing of the United States military, nuclear ICBMs and the New York State penal code in all its multi-volume grandeur. But in a very real way you’re actually worse off than those ancient examples.
At least the Sumerian and French peasants were allowed to try and resist their marauders. If they could organize around a local king or nobleman, they might successfully fight off their attackers. But in Brooklyn if you took up arms (metaphorically of course, guns are strictly forbidden) and arrested the perps yourself, you’d probably be prosecuted by that same District Attorney for any and every bogus charge he could make up. And God forbid the thieves were injured during the arrest. You’d never see the light of day again.
We are reaching a point where the breakdown of civilization in parts of our country will make it impossible for people in the other parts of the country to do business with them. The risk to life and limb and the losses in capital will make it impossible for people in the safer parts of the country to imagine walking into these death traps. In fact, it’s already happening. Chain stores like Rite-Aid and CVS are quickly closing down their branches in places like Portland, Oregon, San Francisco, and Oakland, California and New York City. This will further degrade the environment of these places and hasten the day when anyone with any sense runs away from these hellholes.
I’ll close with the thoughts of the ancient Sumerians when discussing the marauders who afflicted their civilization:
“The Gutians, people who do not know permanent settlement, with human feelings but the instincts of a dog, body shape like that of a monkey, Enlil sent them from the mountains, like locusts they are covering the entire land.”
Well, apparently some things never change.